Over the July 4 weekend, I visited the Midwest’s hottest visual-arts destination this summer — the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing, which opened in May. In Chicago, a town that takes architecture very seriously, the building is being hailed as a masterpiece. Although it’s three stories high, it feels light, intimate and low to the ground, the result of using lots of glass, accented by steel mullion strips, to give the limestone-cladded facade an open and inviting spirit.

The Dayton Art Institute looks at Children in American Art

It begins with a strange and stiff little figure from the 17th century, "Robert Gibbs at 4-1/2 Years." Young Gibbs appears as a miniature adult, in the fashion of the times, holding gloves as his father might, painted by an artist known only as the Freake-Gibbs painter.